Page 36 of Murder Will Out
Willow wasn’t sure what to say.She was lonely and sad and ate a hot fudge sundae and drank too much and wears twelve-hundred-dollar boots and hasn’t betrayed or lied to me that I know of, which is more than I can say for all present company, and she may be having an affair and it’s possible she poisoned her husband but I don’t think so, she wanted to say but didn’t. Instead, she said, “She’s… nice. Nicer than I expected.” She paused. “And she’s worried about Mr. Talbot. She said he somehow got a huge overdose of lithium, and that’s what’s making him so sick.”
The room was silent.
“Lithium,” Diana said thoughtfully. “I vaguely remember itfrom the periodic table, but aside from batteries, I have no idea where it would show up in real life.”
Catherine said, “Lithium carbonate. It’s prescribed as a mood stabilizer for people with bipolar disorder.” She turned to Willow. “I don’t suppose he’s prescribed it, and maybe he accidentally took too much?”
Willow shook her head. “Naomi says no. She knows all his medications, and lithium isn’t one of them.”
“If she’s telling the truth,” Rina said.
“Right. The truth.” Willow’s voice was tight.
Diana’s internal radar pinged again. It wasn’t just Willow; her people-sense had picked up two more items of interest during the previous exchange. First, Catherine had not needed to type anything into a search engine to know lithium’s primary pharmacological use; as with the peculiarities of brake line construction, she had already known. Second, when Diana had asked about lithium’s real-world applications, Rina and Mac had shot a quick look at one another, then looked away and avoided eye contact with each other or anyone else.
“Lithium poisoning.” Catherine was typing again. “Let’s see what I can find—whoa.”
“What?” Willow and Mac demanded.
Catherine read from the site. “Apparently, signs of lithium toxicity include vomiting, confusion, muscle shaking and weakness, slurred speech, diarrhea and frequent urination, and excessive thirstiness, among other things.” She looked up at them. “This sounds familiar.”
Mac said soberly, “He was shaking, slurring, doing alotof the things on that list rightbeforeRina gave him lemonade. We all saw.”
Catherine nodded, still scanning the page. “They are differentiating here between chronic toxicity—where you take in a little at a time until you’re overloaded—and a onetime ‘acute’ overdose. It looks like chronic poisoning hits the neurology, and the GIissues are more likely with an all-at-once overdose.” She frowned, looking around the room. “The thing is, looking down this list—memory problems, kidney failure, muscle tremors, weakness—an awful lot of them seem to go right hand in hand with, you know, the stereotypical ailments people expect for the elderly.”
Catherine looked up from her computer, her face troubled. “All these symptoms—if they happened to a young person, any doctor would be all over it. Maybe they would even with an elderly person, given the chance, but if Geralt himself believed it was nothing more than old age catching up to him, he might not have gone to the doctor to find out. Maybe if he’d seen someone, they would have tested and found it, but…”
Curled up on the couch, Willow’s thoughts were running in circles, hampered by her efforts to pretend Rina wasn’t in the room; the hurt was too raw, the anger too fresh.
Be careful who you trust,Naomi had said.
That’s the problem, isn’t it?Willow thought bitterly. She couldn’t trust Rina, who had, according to Naomi, been responsible for Willow not receiving Sue’s letter in time. She couldn’t really trust Mac or Diana either, because they were Rina’s best friends. She couldn’t trust Geralt, even, the person with the best reason to have Sue out of the way—nor, for that matter, Naomi, who had the best reason to have Geralt out of the way.
She was pretty sure she trusted Catherine, who had hinted at her own doubts yesterday at the library… but even that might have been a step further than was safe. For that matter, she wasn’t sure she could even trust her own mind, which was pretty sure it had spent part of yesterday afternoon talking with ghosts.
But Geralt had been sick before Rina gave him the lemonade. They’d all seen it. Did she honestly believe a complicated string of different people were each individually taking out Cameron heirs, one at a time? No. Occam’s razor: The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
Not that anything about this was simple.
She took a deep breath. “It’s not just Geralt,” she said in a flat voice. “It’s about Cameron House. And who gets to own it.”
Still looking down at her lap, Willow related the conversation she had heard in the foyer of the church after the memorial, and her suspicion that not only Effie but also Sue had been murdered by someone who wanted the mansion for themselves. And she told them about Sue’s efforts—she carefully did not tell the group that a group of ghosts had told her this part—to find another member of the Cameron line to inherit the property. When she finished, there was a shocked silence.
Mac said, surprised, “Well,thatchanges things, doesn’t it?”
Diana shook her head, chagrined. “I feel like an idiot. It seems so obvious, but I don’t think any of us even thought to connect Effie’s death with Sue’s; she was ninety-nine and went, as far as anyone could tell, peacefully, the way she wanted to.”
Catherine nodded. “I admit, it crossed my mind to wonder after Sue died, but I had nothing to base it on. And you have no idea who the other man was?” she asked Willow hopefully.
Willow shook her head. “No. I’ve been going over and over it trying to figure out if I’ve heard him before, but they were too quiet—I never actually heard the voice itself in normal speaking range.”
Catherine was frowning. “‘Now that the old lady’s gone and the lesbian’s out of the way’… are you sure that’s what he said?”
Willow nodded emphatically. “I’m sure. Exact quote.”
Mac’s expression was skeptical. “You can remember word-for-word conversations from two days ago?”
“I, um, have a sort of photographic memory for what I hear.” Willow looked up. “There must be a word for that, but…”
